The north-east can carry the torch for Scotland in the crusade to reduce unemployment among the country’s young people, Sir Ian Wood told the region’s fledgling jobs taskforce yesterday.
Sir Ian, the former chairman of energy giant Wood Group, said the area was in far better position than other parts of Scotland to meet ambitious employment targets put forward last year in his commission’s report into youth joblessness.
He added: “We are very lucky in this part of Scotland. In terms of prospects, we have got a whole bunch of youngsters, whether we call them technicians or tradesmen, who are 25 to 30 years old and they’re earning up to £50,000 a year.

Sinopec, the world's second-biggest oil refiner, is on the hunt for minority investments in U.S. shale oil and gas projects as it seeks to diversify China's supply sources, a senior company official said.
The Chinese state energy firm is keen to take a 10-15 percent stake in projects to export liquefied natural gas (LNG), said Jack Yu, managing director of Sinopec D.C., which handles government relations in the U.S. Previous talks over investing in Freeport LNG's project in Texas fell through, he said.
New deals, if they materialize, would come more than two years after Sinopec made waves with two big U.S. investments, spending more than $3 billion buying various shale stakes from Devon Energy and Chesapeake Energy.

U.S. regulators have given the green light for Royal Dutch Shell's proposed $70 billion acquisition of British rival BG Group, the first clearance for the biggest deal in the energy sector in over a decade.
The two companies said on Tuesday the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had cleared the deal.
The deal, which the companies aim to complete by early 2016, will require further regulatory clearances from all the countries BG operates in, including the European Union, China, Australia and Brazil.

Cost-cutting in Britain's North Sea oil and gas sector could lead to more acute skills shortages in future, industry experts have warned, with some expressing concerns that safety could be compromised.
A plunge in crude prices over the last 12 months has prompted oil majors such as Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips to lay off hundreds of workers.
Oil field services groups such as Amec Foster Wheeler, Wood Group and Petrofac are also in consultation with employees over job cuts.

Russian gas company Gazprom, a leading shareholder in Russia's sole liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, Sakhalin-2, hopes to be able to answer questions about the plant's expansion next year, deputy chief executive Alexander Medvedev said on Tuesday.

The development of a fully-fledged North Sea carbon capture and storage (CCS) network could boost oil recovery – as well becoming the most cost efficient way of meeting UK emissions targets, a new report says.

Algeria, Angola, Iran and Nigeria are interested in blending their light oil with Venezuela's heavy oil to get better a price for their crude, the president of Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA said on Monday.

French oil major Total said on Monday it had begun procedures to restart its La Mede refinery near Marseille, which management had decided to halt after the CGT union called a strike against plans to stop crude processing.

A maintenance outage at Total's St Fergus natural gas terminal was brought forward by a day to start on June 14 and will last for 16 days in total, the company said over the weekend in a regulatory note.

Some of the world's most powerful oil executives will attend Russia's top investment show this week, once again helping the organisers shrug off a meagre turnout from other leading Western industrialists and bankers.

A small-sized oil tanker went missing off the southeast coast of Malaysia close to Singapore over the weekend in what could be the second hijacking of such a vessel this month, maritime officials said on Monday.

South Korea's GS Caltex Corp is set to receive a shipment of 2 million barrels of West African crude, dwarfing the country's usual purchases from the region as it looks to diversify supply away from the Middle East.

EU Climate Action and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete on Thursday launched a plan to turn the Mediterranean region into "a major gas marketplace" as part of the blocs efforts to reduce dependency on dominant oil and gas supplier Russia.

Saudi Arabia is ready to increase its oil output in the coming months to a new record to meet a rise in global demand, despite increased domestic use, a senior state oil company official said on Thursday.

Russian state oil producer Rosneft will be forced to postpone drilling a second well in the Kara Sea for at least two more years, three sources told Reuters, as a result of Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.

OPEC voiced confidence that excess supply in the oil market will ease as demand picks up and supply growth slows from producers outside the group, an indication its strategy of letting prices fall, reaffirmed at a meeting last week, is working.

The United States must lift an "outdated" ban on oil exports to take full economic and geopolitical advantage of its hydraulic fracturing boom, according to a Harvard Business School study released on Wednesday.